This book is an inexhaustible well of the deepest, purest thoughts on language and life that I have ever encountered. I was fortunate enough to have met Pete (as all of his friends knew him) and his beloved wife Judith, sometime in the 70’s. Most of the decades we shared together we started as snail mail friends, but then came the joy of sharing email too.
I see that I am just telling you how I loved him and Judith and those of his kids that I met, and I am saying nothing about his writing itself. This is not an accident. Despite having read and reread many of his papers, I find myself pretty well tongue-tied when I try to explain what it is that Pete says. I have tried to explain it in the first part of a paper which I will paste in. I think that I am a very long way from having captured his quicksilver essence.
If, having read my short discussion of his work, you have a thirst to know more, please read this book. I think that you will also be struck dumb by Pete’s thinking, despite having the opinion that it is of the highest caliber and of the greatest importance.
Following the lead of such thinkers as Pete Becker, Charles Pyle, Paul Friedrich, Paul Hopper, Anneliese Krämer, Charlotte Linde, Gregory Bateson, Paul Feyerabend, and many others, we seek new understandings in the following four overlapping areas, impossible to separate clearly:
A.
1.
Languag(e/ing) itself
From language to languaging (and back again). We wish to be able to study not only objects but also processes. Objects are more fixed, their edges are sharper; processes are dynamic, evolving. It will be of help for our thinking if we do not let ourselves get stuck in either one of these two complementary ways of thinking. It is of fundamental importance that we be able to see languaging as a form of life. Focusing on the ingness, and not just on the thingness, of our talking, reminds us that we can see languaging as a fleeting, provisional, squishy affair – something constantly being re- negotiated, adjusted, fiddled with. A bit like the course of a sailboat, on a windy day, in a river with changing currents, over a sandy bottom.
We are concerned with being able to practice a linguistics of particular- ity, as well as one of generality. This is a fundamental concept in Pete’s thinking (cf. e.g. Alton L. Becker [a.k.a. “Pete” by all of us who love him] (1988)). It recalls the distinction between nomothetic and ideographic ways of thinking (cf. Krämer (1980), who traces these terms to a celebrated address in 1894 by Wilhelm Windelband, though she does not give any bibliographic reference, so I don’t know whether he was a philosopher or what he was). The first of these seeks to explain by cause and general laws, while the second is concerned with tracing the internal structure of unique events or exemplars, such as one transcription of a conversation, or one record of acquisition, or the logic of a single poem. It seems that possibly a majority of linguists would tend to focus solely on the first of these, and to feel that to be truly scientific, one must postulate maximally general laws. We would not be interested in having the pendulum swing all the way to the other extreme; what we hope for, in our own work, is a kind of fluidity of stance, so that we get stuck in neither mode.
For each grammar is a mix of both nomothetic and ideographic state- ments. Thus we approach each problem armed with the biggest possible
set of universal hypotheses, and also with the maximal possible readiness to abandon any or all of them, in order to see the particular in the situation
under study. So in studying German syntax, we approach the distribution of the third-person reflexive pronoun sich expecting, on the basis of general implicational hypotheses, that if it can be anteceded by a non-subject, it will also be antecedable by a subject. Thus we are not surprised when we find that in a sentence like H ans sprach mit P eter über sich, “Hans spoke with Peter about himself,” that the sich can refer only to the subject, Hans. W e would have had to abandon our implicational law, had the sich only been able to refer to Peter. In this sense, our nomothetic understanding guides our study.
However, there are no laws that I know of which would specify how many sentence adverbials can pile up in a sequence in a language, so when we find that German has a set of a dozen or two small words, like denn, “in that case;” aber, “but;” noch, “still;” doch, “really;” mal, “occasionally;” schon, “already,” etc., and that these can stack up in amazing strings, as in Das hast du denn aber doch schon mal gesehen, “Then that you really have already seen from time to time,” we have little guidance from universal grammar, as far as I know, which could advise us as to what to expect. These Satztönungspar- tikelchen, as they are sometimes referred to, have been the object of a lot of recent work. Old grammars used to include a section in their description of whatever language they were about which was called “the genius of the lan- guage” – that part which made that language special, different from all others. Its particular flavor, or kinkiness. So whatever laws govern the sequencings and meanings of these strings of Partikelchen would definitely be one part of the genius of German. No other language (that I know of, anyway) has them in such profusion; we are on our own, when we study them. Our only re- course will be to sink down into German, to try to find out “from the inside” what their logic is. They are a great particularity in German pragmantax.
So we must understand particularity to refer to parts of the structure of individual texts, as well as to parts of the structures of individual languages. And what we must learn is how to juggle, expertly, the general and the partic- ular, how to be, interpenetratingly, ideographs and nomothetes.
[I would like to mention here that this is one of the parts of Pete’s thinking about which I have the greatest certainty that I have only seen a tiny part of the implications of, and am therefore giving probably the least adequate account of. I thus beseech the reader to go and look at what Pete says in his original papers.]
I think that it is only fitting here to bestow on William Blake the title of Patron Saint (a part of the title I doubt that he would stomach very well) of Particularity. Here is a quote, cited in Krämer (1980a), p. 200, to indicate why I feel that he should be singled out for this honor:
“Art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.”
3. From Ortega y Gasset we have learned that all translations inevitably have two defects: (a) they are exuberant, and (b) they are deficient. Our translation is exuberant when we, as translators, are forced by the categories of the language we are translating into to make a distinction which was not contained in the original. Thus when we translate My child is fat into Brasilian, we cannot sidestep the question as to my child’s sex. We have to say either Minha filha é gorda for our daughter, or M eu filho é gordo, if we have a son.
On the other hand, our translation will be deficient if there is a distinction in the language of the original for which we do not succeed in finding something comparable in the target language. A first-level example might be our difficulties in trying to find an English equivalent for the ser / estar distinction that is so fun- damental in Portuguese and Spanish. Thus if we say in Brasilian, Minha filha é gorda, using é, a form of ser, ‘to be,’ we are saying that fatness is a permanent con- dition for my daughter, a sentence which has an adequate translation, using a predicate noun: ‘My daughter is a fat person.’ The problem comes with a sen- tence like Minha filha está gorda. Estar implies that the condition of fatness is a temporary one. We would have to say something like ‘My daughter is fat right now,’ or ‘My daughter is temporarily fat.’ We would have “succeeded” in such a translation in conveying “the substance” of the ser / estar distinction, but it is clear that we would be missing something. A difference between a verb with a predi- cate noun (be + N) and the same verb with an adverbial modifier (be A [temporarily / right now]) just doesn’t have the same feel as a difference between two verbs (ser / estar) which have highly parallel syntactic roles. It is parallels of this type that are always getting “lost in translation.”
For another example, let us consider the problem faced by a translator into Brasilian of any one of the following family of sentences: Bonnie [walked / strolled / strutted / swaggered / slunk / ambled / shambled / meandered / slogged / slouched / trudged / snuck / slipped / stamped / stomped / charged / marched / minced / tiptoed / flounced / humped / limped / hobbled / trotted / crashed / jangled / lurched / careened / swayed / tot- tered / toddled / strode / bopped / boogied / swished / swept / sidled / stumbled / staggered / hopped, etc.] over to Connie’s house. Where English has three dozen or more “man- ner of walking” verbs, Brasilian makes do with one basic one, andar, “walk,” and a few others (such as mancar, “to limp,” which can be used with a directional adverb as its object). This small set would then need to be modified in various adverbial ways. So while the English speaker has an immediately available choice of three dozen subcategories, with the possibility of an indefinite number of further ad- verbial refinements, the Brasilian speaker has to reach for the adverbs right away, or much quicker, anyway.
Furthermore, the English speaker has the possibility of pushing a lexical item (cf. the notion of jarwa dhosok, in section 6 on prior text, on p. 7 below) through a partially productive pattern, creating a new manner-of-walking verb: Bonnie [panted / ??seeped / ?sobbed / ??gloomed / rhapsodized] over to Connie’s house. Brasilian offers no parallel route to lexical newness in the area of manner-of-walking verbs. How then are we going to translate a “pushed” form in English, like pant, into Brasilian? It is simply not good enough to use something equivalent to Bon- nie was panting as she walked over to Connie’s house. While that might convey “the substance” all right, it would miss out on the newness. It would not be true to the poeticity of the English original.
And we cannot maintain that we are always going to be able to sidestep such poeticity, because yesterday’s lexical or metaphorical poems are today’s grammatical commonplaces. To give just a brief example of such a case, which results in an even deeper kind of untranslatability, let us look briefly at verb particles. How are we going to get into Brasilian the difference between H erbert cleaned the table and H erbert cleaned the table off? For a certain small class of transitive verbs (clean, wash, wipe, dust, sweep), adding the particle off to the verb implies that the direct object has a surface, or something of the sort. Basically, the same is true of another, larger class of transitive verbs which take off, but which have slightly different thematic relations – verbs like sand / steam / scrape / blast / etc. off, where the presupposition is that the direct object is being removed from some- thing which has a surface. Thus the eeriness of the particle-ized variant of H er- bert cleaned the steel wool (????off) – steel wool doesn’t have a decent surface. And it is not only with transitive verbs that off is linked to a requirement of something having a surface; consider such intransitives as freeze off, drop off, rattle off, etc. It is possible for body parts which are viewed as extremities, or as protruding suffi- ciently from a sort of “basic body shell,” or body “surface,” to be subjects of such verbs: Maxwell’s [nose / ears / legs] froze off. But other body parts, more towards the interior, cannot be: *Maxwell’s thigh / nostril / lap froze off. “Body parts” has to be understood in a general enough way for (certain types of) machines to be said to have them: My car’s [taillights / *chassis just rattled off. The speaker of English feels that all of these uses of off are intimately related – that they are in some way generalizations from the basic sense of this morpheme, which we see in a sen- tence like Maria Zilda jumped off of the table. I of course cannot here come close to describing the exquisite intricacies of particles like up, out, over, etc., which have formed the basis of some rich research carried out by scholars like Sue Lindner (cf. Lindner (1981)) and Claudia Brugman (cf. Brugman (1981)), which is reviewed in depth in Lakoff (1987) and Langacker (1987). But I hope to have giv- en you at least a feeling for the multiple ways in which it is possible for a translation to be deficient.
Ortega’s deeper point is that all language use is inescapably touched by exuberance and deficiency, even in communication between speakers of the same language. We can only succeed in saying something about something by virtue of choosing to be silent about something else. And different languages (or speakers of them) make different choices of equilibria between silence and expressability, which leads to untranslatability, and to communication between the differing worlds of different speakers which must always be less than perfect.
4. From Lloyd Anderson, we have this fundamental question always before us:
How squishy is the phenomenon that we are looking at?
We have available theoryings with gradience, or fuzzy categories, or prototypes (thanks to Dwight Bolinger, Lotfi Zadeh, Eleanor Rosch, George Lakoff, and others) as well as theoryings with sharp categories. We need to ask ourselves what mix of these descriptive possibilities seems most appropriate in whatever area we are looking at. From Anneliese Krämer (1980b), we have this quote from Schelling to guide us:
First and above all, an explanation must do justice to the thing that is to be explained; must not devalue it, interpret it away, belittle it, or garble it in order to make it easier to understand. The question is not: “At what view of the phenomenon must we arrive in order to explain it in accordance with one or another philosophy?”, but precisely the reverse: “What philosophy is required if we are to live up to the subject, be on a level with it?”
The question is not how the subject must be turned, twisted, narrowed, crippled so as to be explicable at all costs on principles that we have once and for all resolved not to go beyond. The question is: “To what point must we enlarge our thought so that it shall be in proportion to the phe- nomenon?”
Friedrich Schelling
Philosophie der Mythologie, 1856
From sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking, we have
learned to see that the idea that there is one language called “Brasilian Portuguese,” or “English” is very limiting. Not only are there many regional variants, but also many variants that depend on social classes, degree of formality, degree of sexism, degree of excitedness, on the amount of evasiveness, or obscurantism, or jargonese, or... which is desired. Languagings are as flexible and personalizable as are those who use them.
Each of us is free to choose to reduce vowels more or less, to be less or more creative or innovative – to resist new words or patterns, or to help coinvent them – to use lots of agentive expressions (Zenda broke the sarcophagus) or to avoid them (The sarcophagus got broken)... and so on, along an incalculably large number of dimensions of lingual choice. Each of us carves out our own poetry within the vast space of subtle differences that are always available to us to play with.
To know a language is to know an indefinite number of registers, language games, and so on. From creolistics, we see that there are incalculably many steps along the continua of decreolization, as a prior pidgin, like Tok Pisin, acquires native speakers and begins to want the full richness of a mature system. From the study of second and first language acquisition, we learn that there are boundlessly many kinds of Portuglishes – communicative systems that are neither “pure” Portuguese (whatever that might mean) nor “pure” English.
We understand why it was that the convenient fiction that “pure” Maxacalí was the only thing that had to be described was a popular belief, and we understand even the political power of such fictive stances, but we know that it is time to take our heads out of the sand, dust our hands off, and get down to the real work.
6. Prior text – from Pete Becker’s work, we see that a language consists not only of a set of productive rules, which can be used to generate infinities of new words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., but that to know English is to know a large set of remembered language – prior text – from individual words (say, conspiratorial, articulateness, expiration) to constructions (I think that I can say without fear of contradiction that... ; to let bygones be bygones) to whole sentences (The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak; Only time will tell; Who do you think you’re kidding?) We also know how some of these can be modified, added to, bent into the service of fitting a present context better – conspirational, articulacy, expiry; Let’s let (the proverbial) bygones be (??the proverbial) bygones; x. As Pete reminds us, every use of language is a mix of speaking the past (= using raw, unmodified, prior text) and speaking the present (bending, pushing, old language – jarwa dhosok, as the Javanese call it – into a present context). An indelible example of this is Pete’s sentence An example, an example, my dissertation for an example).
Thus one of the things that we must ask, when working on some aspect of a language is:
How free is this part of language? How much can the jarwa be dhosoked?
7. Work by conversation analysts like Fred Erickson, Ron Scollon, and Ray McDermott has suggested to us that to an extent at present unknown, languaging can be collective. A simple example is one partner finishing a sentence that was begun by another. More compelling are their demonstrations that all conversations proceed in accordance with a beat, a rhythmic pulse which synchronizes not only linguistic events, like the main stresses of clauses, but also non-linguistic actions, such as the turning of a page in a book, or the opening of a Coke bottle. To think of language as only the principles governing the linguistic events that emit from one person in isolation is a bit like imagining that we can describe New Orleans jazz by giving the constraints on solos, but not those on ensemble.
8. We have come to feel that if we persist in the tradition of ignoring aesthetics in our studies of languag(e/ing), hoping that it will be good enough to go away, we will end up with a description of language that will be merely true. Like a translation that preserves only the substance of the original. But we may have come to feel that there are things that go beyond truth, which we intuit to lie in the areas of mind which concern beauty, or even wisdom. Among the many luminous quotes that Pete has read into the linguistic record is this one, from the invigoratingly novel source of one of the great voices of our century, Billie Holiday – a line from the jazz classic, Body and Soul:
“Without the magic, the end would be tragic.”
Some (e.g., Ross (1986)) would go so far as to say that the tradition of drawing a sharp line between poetry and prose is misguided; that every language is a poem [better: can profitably be looked at as if it were a poem, can be seen as a poem]. Gregory Bateson has a helpful way of formulating this shift in perspective:
Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down
and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic. (1972, p. 136)
I would like to agree with all of this except the suggestion that there is any value difference between poetry and prose. They are just different kinds of beauties, like Beatles and sand painting.
Theorists without any sharp line between these kinds of beauty may come to feel that if they did not know how to talk about, say, the holographic structure of a poem, or some other aspect of poetic structure, they would inevitably only be able to arrive at descriptions of a language as limited as if they did not know how to talk about complementary distribution, or constituent structure, or presuppositions. There appears to be a universal language of poetry, which has ways of dividing poems into sections at the same time as they are being combined into unities. It is a language in which the usual laws of paradox are suspended. It would seem to be as important for a student of languag(e/ing) to get a grasp of the fundamentals of this language as it would for them to under- stand the language of structuration which mainstream linguistics has been devel- oping for the last hundred years or so.
An eloquent testimony to the possibility of transcending any distinction between poetry and prose is provided by the life and the immense body of work of Roman Jakobson – one of the real giants in the history of linguistics, who I will always be grateful to for opening my mind to the possibility of thinking along these lines. For a look at the way this great thinker and artist approached poetics, cf. Jakobson (1981).
But it is not enough to say that languages are poems. If they are, who are their poets?
Us.
There is no escaping our responsibility for the beauty and poetry of what we say. I think that I first began to realize this when I read, for the first of many times, the following wonderful quote from one of the great American po- ets, William Carlos Williams, which I have Joe Goguen to thank for sending to me:
“But after we have run the gamut of the simple meanings that come to one over the years, a change gradually occurs. We have grown used to the range of communication which is likely to reach us. The girl who comes to me breathless, staggering into my office, in her underwear a still breathing infant, asking me to lock her mother out of the room; the man whose mind is gone – all of them finally say the same thing. And then a new meaning begins to intervene. For under that language to which we have been listening all our lives a new, a more profound language, under- lying all the dialectics offers itself. It is what they call poetry. That is the final phase.
It is that, we realize, which beyond all they have been saying is what they have been trying to say. They laugh (For are they not laughable?); they can think of nothing more useless (What else are they but the same?); something made of words (Have they not been trying to use words all their lives?). We begin to see that the underlying meaning of all they want to tell us and have always failed to communicate is the po- em, the poem which their lives are being lived to realize. No one will be- lieve it. And it is the actual words, as we hear them spoken under all cir- cumstances, which contain it. It is actually there, in the actual life be- fore us, every minute that we are listening, a rarest element – not in our imaginations but there, there in fact. It is that essence which is hidden in the very words which are going in at our ears and from which we must recover underlying meaning as realistically as we recover metal out of ore.” (1951, pp. 361 - 362)
Coming to realize that I am speaking, with every word that I say, with this next word I write to you, the poem which my life is being lived to realize, has had a profound effect on my life as a linguist. And it is one that I cannot prove the importance of, or do anything as adversarial as science is often conceived to be, to compel you to pay attention to. All I know how to do is to fall, again and again, under the spell of some poem or other, and to try to show anyone who is kind enough to listen, how beautiful are the structures which the poet’s genius has molded their language into, language as unforgettably particular as the soarings of a John Coltrane solo, or of a William Carlos Williams sentence.
B. Theorying about languaging
1. As Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela insist, in their The Tree of Knowledge, theorists must abandon certainty , and objectivity , as goals – they must “bracket objectivity.” For this reason, following the lead of such dadaist philosophers of science as Paul Feyerabend, we strive to be pluralists in our theoretical thinking. We resonate with physicist Geoffrey Chew’s capsule description of bootstrap theory:
“A physicist who is able to view any number of different partially successful models without favoritism is automatically a bootstrapper.” [quoted in Capra (1977) p. 312.]
2. Similarly, no theory is ever final, or complete. Thus our goal, in theorying, is not to put the final dots on all the i’s, so that we end up with The Ultimate Account of Passives and Reciprocals, or Vowel Lowering in Kwakiutl Tonic Inchoative Suffixal Negations, or whatever. Our goal is to take whatever data pulls us, ensirens us, and, given what our particular way of looking must be, because of what our own intellectual biography has been, to be as true to the inner logic of that way of looking as we can. We remember that the root of theory is thea, the same as the root of theater. Thea simply means “a vantage point.” Our theory will be one way of looking among many. We feel that the more thea’s we can get airborne in our minds, the less blind spots we are likely to have in our understandings of our data, which we know will always be inexhaustible, which will always offer new ways to beauty.
A quote from Pete in this regard may be helpful (cf. Becker (1988), p. 20):
That’s all fine and interesting, you may say, but why a linguistics in the humanities? What’s wrong with the linguistics we have now? The answer is, probably nothing. It’s just that there is a lot of other work to be doing which involves a close look at languaging, and other ways to be doing it, and I would like to present some thoughts on this linguistics in the humanities that these ancestors have opened up for us. I speak not in opposition to another kind of linguistics, but rather to identify a kind of work which needs doing. I don’t want to replace scientific linguistics with anything else. I want to look at something which I think is important to do but which can’t be handled within scientific linguistics.
3. From subatomic physics, when we hear statements like “Every particle is (included in) every other particle,”
we realize that the smaller the realm of our physical investigations, the less its laws are likely to resemble the laws that govern the behavior of objects in our human-sized world. And the larger will be the effects of our awareness on the data. We can only wonder to what extent something parallel obtains for linguistics.
4. Following Paul Hopper’s lead (cf. Hopper (1988)), we seek an equilibrium in our grammar-writing between trying to write the more common, fixed, noun-like, grammars that Hopper refers to as a priori grammars and trying to write the new, more verb-like, kind of grammars that he refers to as emergent grammars. This distinction recalls, though I am not sure that it is the same as, the distinction drawn in §1 above between language and languaging.
5. One “article,” first published in English and then in German, in the journal Trickster (Friedrich (1989)), has made me wonder if we should not aim much higher, in our writing and teaching, than for mere factual correctness, or depth of explanatory power of our theorying.
Paul Friedrich is a poet/linguist/anthropologist at the University of Chicago; he has been working with the Tarascans, an indigenous tribe in Mexico, for almost thirty years, and has already published many articles on them. What makes this “article” so special, for me (I put article in quotes because this comes across very differently from a typical academic article - maybe more like an essay - yet even that wouldn’t do justice to the really different feel that this piece of writing gives one), is its mix of autobiography, poetry, ethnography and linguistics. He tells what it was like to see the country of the Tarascans for the first time; to have been riding on a bus bound for Indian Country, and to watch the first three members of the tribe that he had ever seen get on the bus and sit down, to have heard for the first time the sounds of the language he was to work with for so many years. To have been fascinated to observe them, unobserved - and to have liked them, liked the way they joked. To have said to himself, “Hmm. So those are my Indians. I like the way you look.”
An important part of this Trickster piece-of-writing is about how the Tarascans extend the words for body parts and for other spatial concepts metaphorically, and how the Tarascan world is full of “mouths,” “necks,” “heads,” “pots,” “fields,” and so on. For instance, the suffix -mu, which has a basic meaning of “mouth, lips,” is used for lip of a woman, the lip of a pot, the entrance of a cave, the opening of a bell, the bell of a flower, the banks of a river, and in many more contexts.
The stages in the growth of corn also have a rich set of interconnections, among other things, with the suffix -nari, “face, outer surface.” Paul mentions that -nari shows up in twenty-five words for parts of the corn growth cycle, and in hundreds more which implicitly compare corn with stars, tongues, virgins, the womb, dry bones, lips, teeth, and a large part of the words which have to do with shame and sin, the “loss of face.”
It’s a bit like the way we see bodies into many parts of our world: a head of cabbage, the
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